Emoji in subject line—technique doesn't always work

[Jaina]

I've been using the technique outlined in this blog post to use emoji in subject lines:

https://blog.teknkl.com/yes-you-can-use-emojis-in-marketo-subject-lines/

But it doesn't seem to always work—occasionally the emoji will appear but sometimes the raw Q code would appear in the subject line. 

Has anyone had any experience using this technique? Or is there a better technique?

[SanfordWhiteman]

It's the only way. 🙂  And used many millions of times a day.

Do you have a repro case for an emoji, and the full Subject line: including the Q-encoded segment, that doesn't work? Every time someone's mentioned this in the past, it hasn't been reproducible.

[Jaina]

I'll try to reproduce it, but it was very hard to reproduce - sometimes it'd work, sometimes not! I was wondering if there were specific emoji the technique simply didn't work with. Will keep testing. But it's a little unnerving to see this technique work sometimes when you need to send a live email.

[SanfordWhiteman]

There's no Unicode code point that can't be Q-encoded. But you can't use Emojis that simply aren't supported (yet) in all mail clients & browsers.

For example, I received these emails the other day. Check the Subject: of the first one. I didn't bother Q-decoding the missing glyph to see what they meant, but obvs. my late-model Android phone doesn't have the glyph in the default font. Bad choice!

[A_Savage]

This outlines 1 issue

https://nation.marketo.com/t5/product-discussions/stripping-utf-codes-emojis-in-subject/m-p/286460/h...

TL;DR:

Something breaks with encoding and dashes. Avoid.

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

There isn’t a bug with dashes — people just don’t realize dashes themselves need to be Q-encoded.

This Subject line:

From me — and my 🐶 family — to yours

Is encoded like this:

=?UTF-8?Q?From me =E2=80=94 and my =F0=9F=90=B6 family =E2=80=94 to yours=20?=

Q-encoding doesn’t have anything directly to do with emojis, as it pertains to all non-ASCII characters.